YouSaid · the spoken record

David Perell

lines on the record: 311
first: 2023-03-29
most recent: 2023-03-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is So, the way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass, and he's unbelievably good, and we're so lucky to have him. And then he sends us a rough cut. I upload it to script, and then we listen and read while we're listening word for word, sentence for sentence, and try to cut every unnecessary sentence. And we end up pulling out 20-ish minutes of just fluff. It's just like, okay, we could have been tighter in that point. Is there a way to get tighter in it without re-recording it? And I think that has dramatically contributed to episode quality, because by the time we ship it, neither of us feel that there are extraneous sentences.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do this all the time where I'll go back and listen to old episodes because people are like, that's weird. You don't know a podcast. It's like, no, this is a tool. That's how you get better. This is two footage. No, we'd even try to get better. It's like, I was like, oh, I haven't read that book in like two years. I'll just listen to my episode on it. And it serves as a tool for me. That's how I know it's good for other people, right? And so I was like, and then I'll listen to it. I'm like, oh, wow, I forgot that I need to keep that idea in my mind. But I'll hear myself like, oh, you said that in two paragraphs, that could have been one paragraph. Cut that part. That doesn't make sense. And so, yeah, I understand the improvement. But what I'm saying is your quality is already super high. Like it can increase and get better. Don't get me wrong, but like, you're never going to be embarrassed. You're just like, oh, I could probably do it 20%, 30% better, which is still excellent from the level you're at.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's totally unpredictable. It's our, because we haven't shared this publicly yet, it's our number one episode by a huge margin, 40,000 more people have listened to that episode than the next highest, which was Amazon.com. Incredible. I probably could have told you, actually, I was like, David, no one's going to listen to Amazon because everyone already knows this story, which was super wrong. But I either thought like no one will listen to this one or this will be our most successful episode. With LVMH, even after we recorded it, I was like,”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't mean you But no, like I look back and I think yes, that's certainly an episode. I don't know how you feel, but I'm proud of, but I look back at the time, like, so we didn't know that was going to be a super popular episode.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're never going to be embarrassed about your latest episode at the time we're making this is LVMH. You're never going to be embarrassed about that. That was excellent. It doesn't mean you can't keep improving 10 years from now.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been thinking about that, and I was thinking about ahead of our conversation here. Used to say all the time people are like, Oh, I go back, I listen to their early episodes. I'm like, no, don't, it's so embarrassing Think like we always want to be embarrassed by our last episode. We've just constantly kept like Every episode, like we try and just notch it up because we”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so you see, oh, that same guy that became the richest person in the world that now family has a rich family or whatever, it's like he's imperfect too, just like I am. And so that is the only benefit of listening to an early acquired or early founder is like, oh, you see the improvement just like in the books. You see the improvement.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he goes, he goes, I'm not whipped. I found the store off. I'll do it again, right? And it's like Yes, Walmart is a huge success. You guys made the point that there was a great point where it's like, you're never going to think 25 years in the future when there's watermelons and donkey crap on the ground, that this is going to be the richest family in the world, right?”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially when it's been long running, you're like, oh, this has always been immaculate and perfect. And then you get to go see some of the early work and you're like, oh, it's like who you were talking about.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that way, at least by the time you get to one, you're a fan. But if you start at one, you're like, oh, these guys just suck. But it's almost like there's great pleasure in hearing something that you think is excellent and fully baked and”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does the Monday morning podcast. He used to do it every Monday. Now he does, I think, Monday and Thursdays, right? He is one of the first podcasters. When he was podcasting his first episodes, at the time he would do it, he would call into a number and record, right? And then there was a service that would transform that recording from your phone into an MP3 that you could publish.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, there's another guy that, so I took Dan Carl and I was like, I was obsessed with his. I've listened to all his episodes for like years talking about falling asleep. I did that too. But I fell asleep to Dan Carlin. So I'd over and over and over again to now where I listened to him, I'm like, it's like...”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One person, so like one, and I've done this forever, it's like It's funny. I remember it's one of my friends that we met up one day and I was like, man, I think I'm going to try to make a business around the fact that I read so much. And he's like, and he called me like a year, like six months ago, a year ago, he's like, I can't believe you did that. Because he's like, I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard. But I just picture him when I started. It's like, oh, the whole idea behind the show was like, what if you got to meet up once a week with your friend that reads a lot and he just tells you the stuff that he read that week? Like interesting ideas. And so I was”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I first started, they're like, hey, you contact the few podcast advertising networks there were back then, you know, because you guys started your show in 2016, right? Okay, so I started in 2016. And you contact me, they're like, yeah, we can do ads for your show. You know, you need like 25,000 downloads an episode. And at the time, I'm like, I'll never get there. Like obviously we skyrocketed past that. But like that's impossible. That's like as many people as in a basketball arena.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you made a good, I think you were getting to a good point. It's like, because the business model didn't support that. And so now distribution. And now with podcasting, it's like, you guys, you know, I'm sure I think like, I don't ever look at analytics, but I think last time I looked, it was like 50% of my audience was in the United States, but then everywhere. And so I was doing the early days of founders, I was just, I remember it all changed because I couldn't figure out the business models. So you would do like affiliate, you know, at that time I remember when I first started.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can also find intellectual, high quality content more easily now because all content, because there were a limited number of channels and a limited number of time slots, everything had to be produced for the lowest common denominator. And now you can opt into your niche and find the highest quality content in that niche. And the only way to do that before was books. There wasn't an audio way, there wasn't content. There wasn't niche audio content broadly available.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just streamed radio. No, the first on demand was the first time I saw this, I was like, this is insane. Like, especially for people that are learning machines using Charlie's, where it's like, I can go to even today. Like they did. You can go to any podcast player, type in whatever you want to learn about, and then you can hear somebody that's usually spent hundreds of hours teaching you about this stuff.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then remember, like, I remember so you have the jump up from that, and then the AM radio stations would then start streaming to your browser internet. It still wasn't on demand. So if you're not listening at 3 o'clock or 12 like you miss it, and then once I saw”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, I used to listen to Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Do you ever listen to this? Like, it's when all the other radio programming sort of expires and then you enter the 1 in the morning a.m. radio stuff. And it was like, you know, aliens and tons of normal stuff. But it was like, if you listen, like...”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would listen to talk radio when I was a kid, and at that time, you know, it's not like there's no on-demand anything. You would listen sports talk radio, politics talk radio. It's embarrassing. There was like this woman that used to be on at night, people would write in like advice for their love life. And I'd listen to that. Just the idea of like, there's all this information.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next to a fire shivering thinking about how embarrassing it was to have to go to school with tighter clothing. That guy's never going to go back to that and he never loses it. So I've just always been a reader. That's the only thing ever, like the only one unbroken habit I've always had. And so I just had this idea like I was a social podcast forever. I was obsessed with audio before there was such thing as a podcast.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's in Canada growing up, their parents had lost so much money. They think they were Jewish and they had to escape from persecution in Russia. I can't remember where they came from, but they go and they have to start all over, and they're in Canada and there's no heating. And they're freezing. So he has this psychopathic drive to change, but that stays with you forever. So once he builds this massive company and literally changes the trajectory of all of his descendants. And as his daughter's an adult and she tells the story in the book where Sam is sitting there in like a mansion.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sam Hinke, our mutual friend, actually gave me the way to think about this, and it's called the founder of your family, right? And it's the person that like And I used to call them, and it was a terrible name, but generational inflection points because you'd read this in the biography where you have like generation after generation of just not good things happening, and then one person just says it stops now. That's what Rockefeller”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, hey, this way you don't do drugs, like this is the perfect example of you observe bad behavior and then you do the opposite. So long story short, I've always been obsessive reading. Like one of the best things my mom ever did was even if we didn't have money for books, she would take me to the bookstore and just sit there. Like, you know, bookstores are so cool because they just let you read. No one comes here and is like, hey, you've been reading for an hour. Like, you got to get out of here. And just read and read and read.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, at an event, Andrew Wilkinson was hosting for a bunch of entrepreneurs, me, Shane Parrish from the Knowledge Project, and Farnum Street was up there, Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World, and we were doing this panel together, and Shane's the moderator, and we don't know what we're going to talk about beforehand. And so Shane asked the question, it's like, oh, what did you learn most from your upbringing or something like that, right? And I go, I learned not to do cocaine and to graduate high school. So that kind of thing, right? And so there was just a bunch of anti-models. I thought about this as I was walking through the tenderloin this morning in San Francisco.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I mutual friend Jeremy from Formula of Tiny. I just spent like a bunch of hours with him. He was in town. In one sentence. He psychoanalyzed me better than anybody else ever has. He goes. You didn't have any mentors growing up, so you like you have, then you took it to this extreme, and he said it much more eloquently than I am, but he's like, you didn't have any mentors. So I view your career as like this psychopathic search for like mentors that can help you. You know, so like to answer questions like, I don't want to go into too much detail here. But like, I've only had one habit my whole life, and that was reading. I was reading for as long as I can remember. My mom passed away from breast cancer a couple years ago. We didn't have like a lot of money, like long story, but like I was the first person not to graduate college, but like high school in my family. I came from a family, unfortunately, both sides of family, like no education, a lot of like just bad habits. So I identify with a lot what Charlie Munger says because he essentially observes bad behavior and then tries to do the opposite, right? So I was just, let me give an example. I was just up in Canada.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Or an Edwin Land idea. Like when you used to watch the presentation that Steve would give where he's like, oh, we're building at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. He put up on screen. He ran off the whole. Edwin Said that exact word, but that's the point. It's like you're never going to find anybody gets to the top of the profession without doing the work, like studying the people that came before them and learning from them and admiring them.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Charlie is like the oracle, and it's crystal clear. You are not like you were going to understand what the idea he's trying to get into your brain for sure. But my point being is all of the people that we study, they don't denigrate the past. Steve Jobs, the reason I'm so obsessed with Evan Lann, I read in a biography when Steve was like in his 20s, Edwin Land is in like 70s. He goes and meets Edwin Land and he goes, visiting Edwin Land was like visiting a shrine. He's like, he is my hero. More people should try to be like that. And then you guys made the point in that, you know, Jeff Bezos took a lot of ideas from Sam. Who took a bunch of ideas from Sony too? Steve and Jeff. So you always find these people where you're like, oh, I thought this was a Steve Jobs idea.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Demoing for Steve is like asking questions to the Oracle Delphi, except the Oracle Delphi would respond with a riddle. And he's like, no, no, Steve was unwelvably, like crystal clear. You understood him. Out of every single person I've ever studied, Steve Jobs is by far the clearest thinker I have ever come across. Like I just gifted at that.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he made the keyboard for when it was still operated in purple or something keyboard. He made Safari before the iPhone. He has this excellent book that I've read like three times called Creative Selection. I think how Apple Design Products and Golden Age of Steve Jobs might be the subtitle. But he talked about that because he demoed to Steve, right? And you're not going to describe it to him. You're going to demo and you're going to hand it to him. And so they iterate, you guys already know this, they iterate through a series of demos. And it's based on Steve's taste. It's not, oh, let's talk about this. Like, nope, do this, do this, that. And so Ken has a great line in the book where he's like.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so now what happens is you mentioned, dude, we don't even read one book about him, you'll go crazy. And so what happens is when I'm really interested in somebody, I will, I listen to Bill Gurley. Again, I just take advice from people who are smarter to me. Bill said, go collect everything you can. Okay, good. I'll do that. This is simple ideas. And so I'll find somebody that's interesting. I'll read everything about them. And so with Charlie, I have like a little Charlie Munger on my shoulder. I have a little Steve Jobs, a little Edwin Lan, a little David Ogu. Like, you'll have an idea of how they would respond. Did you guys ever read Ken Cocienda's book Creative Selection? Oh, that's shocking.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So being a nut job and completely crazy is, I think, makes you harder to compete with. And it's also, we're going to go all over the map here, but it's impossible not to be that. Like think about how steeped you guys are in the same information that I am, where it always says, oh, you're the sum of your five friends or whatever, right? Well, it's like, it's also like what you're the sum of your podcasts you listen to. And the books you read. And so what happens?”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should every time I talk to somebody who wants to, I'm always like, you absolutely should do this. And you will, even if you never succeed in terms of any numerical success, you will succeed because you are learning.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I definitely am nuts for sure. And that's going to be like, we can talk about, did you guys read Jeff Bezos' last shareholder letter before he, the best lines he has is at the end. He's like differentiation is survival. And so think about that, like how hard they say, let's say somebody says, damn, I love what David doing. I'm going to do the exact same thing. They can jump in and try to do that, right? But you have six years of experience, you have 600 hours out there.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He has billions and billions, or not billions and billions of years of collectives like human history. This guy spent 70 years and there's thousands of them. And like Sam Walton's book, how many people spent 50 years in one industry in the retail industry? And he distilled it down. And then you could read it in a week and then you could listen to Aquire's episodes. You can listen to David's episodes on Sam. Okay, this is good in addition to that.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And listen, I'm not, and this is another thing where I feel like everybody's like, oh, this time is different. This is new. It's like human nature has never changed. It will never change. This time is not different. You're just the difference is if you don't study the history of the people that came for you, you're just ignorant and making mistakes that people already saw in the past. Learning from history is a form of leverage.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does, so he goes, I read this isn't something he said at dinner, I've heard him say publicly. He's like, I read Baron's every all the time for 50 years. I found one idea that I can act on. I made $50 million on that deal. And then I took that $50 million and I gave it to Lilu. Is that the $50 million to Lilu and Lilu turned it into $400 million? That's how I made $400 million from Reading Barons.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were talking about this earlier that you have a chat. It sounds like Charlie is just like a very curiosity driven machine, but we know there's lots of folks that have regular dinners and have groups of people, often geographically dispersed. Why did they do it? Why is it worth their time, their money, their effort? It's that. They get one idea. The leverage that they can get on that is”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, of course, the reason why so many of them listen to both of our shows, right? It's because they're building machines where they literally can turn knowledge into profit, right? I become close friends with the guy through the podcast. He's a young kid. I don't mean to call him a kid. He's not a kid, but he's a lot younger than I am. And he's like 28 years old. And we were on the phone the other day because he had a very serious offer for a company. He owns like 95% of and they were going to give him $100 million, right? Ends up saying no to it. But the point is like when you talk to him, you know, he's listened to all the episodes. He's read like 60 of the books. He'll text me a picture of like, he won't even tell me what the book. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure I read that. Like, he's like, oh yeah, it's from this episode. It's like, oh, why? What if he finds one idea in a book, one idea in a podcast, and it gives a 10% improvement on his company? It's a $10 million idea.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have no excuse not to do this. And so he gives the example of you want to be a domain expert in whatever you're doing. Like within two years of intense study, if you're doing that and you're focused on it, it's like you're going to get to the point where you know more than maybe anybody else. And so that's my whole thing was like when you talk to, you've never met a founder or an entrepreneur that's like kind of into entrepreneurship. It's like, no, it's our lives.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That fantastic talk he gave, which to me is the best talk for entrepreneurs and investors on YouTube. It's called Running Down a Dream, How to Survive and Thrive in a Career You Love. And he says, he's like, listen, in the age of the internet, he's like, you don't have to be the smartest person, right? Charlie Munger, after talking to him, whatever mind that dude has, I don't have that. And I'm cool with that. Like, I could not imagine trying to compete against that guy 40 years ago. Like, he would destroy me, right? He's got a supermind that I don't have. But what Bill says is like, you may like you don't have to be the smartest person, but you can collect more the most information. And he holds you to a high standard in that talk.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the truth is always, it is always the case that the clean narrative is grafted onto a fact pattern. And it's like, okay, well, what I care about is the lessons I can learn from the clean narrative. Not does the fact pattern, if you had all the facts in totality,”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing something your competitors are not doing, right? And this ties together what you just said is like they all learn from somebody else. When we're reading these books and listening to these podcasts, it's like, what's the idea I can use in my life? We're not building the next Walmart. There's no way if we read Titan. We could tell did this actually happen. I don't know, but I'm looking for the ideas behind it. I'm going to verify for every single word in this book. That's ridiculous.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about all the time because people are like, oh, survivorship bias or visionist history and everything else. It's like, here's the problem. Humans don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. So we could have this super long conversation between the three of us right now, then go in another room and write down what just occurred. And every single version is going to be different because it's viewed through all of our experience, the way we think, the words we use. And so what I'm looking at is like when I'm reading about Sam Walton, right? It's just like the story we both hit on all the podcasts because I've done a bunch of podcasts on Sam too. Where it's like the guy's pissed off. He's just like driving him to store to store and these like mountain roads taking forever. So he buys the plane and he realizes like, oh, this is a massive advantage because I'm doing something my competitors aren't, right? I'm flying over and you guys mentioned it too, which I thought was hilarious. And then he just lands and he's like, who owns that? Let me land. And then he buys for action. So he's like, we're going to negotiate right now. I want to buy it from you. And so my point is like, okay, yes, that most likely occurred. But what is the idea behind that? It's due, you can have an advantage.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're talking about this idea that the way to get truth is to weave together the tapestry of all of history's stories of things that are adjacent to understand like how this opportunity to start some business came to be. And you always have to, like, all history is revisionist and all history is biased. And so I think one of the hardest things about making an acquired episode is figuring out when we're looking at a source, like someone giving an industry talk who works at a company or like a biographer who chose to dedicate two years of their life to writing this book after working at Newsweek and covering the sector forever is like trying to mentally account for and discount from whatever bias and perspective they're coming in with to create whatever the source material is that we're using to then incorporate into our version of”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% they're learning machines. And so you get to Charlie's tying this all back to this. You get to Charlie's bookshelf and it's just biographies I've never even heard of. And I do this for a living. And over a living, I was like, what is this book? And then I started looking. I was like, oh, I've just taken picture after picture after picture. I was like, I'm ordering every single one.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even the contemporaries, like the point that Walton always made was I don't think my competitors are stupid. I want to go shop my competitors and get all of their very best insights and then bring them into my store.”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's what listening to Acquired and Founders is you're watching Game Tape of History's Grace Entrepreneurs. Sam did this when he was younger, but this ties together where Bill Gurley had a fantastic quote about this, a tweet about this, when all that crypto was going crazy and like the run-up and people were getting rich and he's like, one thing I don't like, and I'm paraphrasing because I wasn't expecting to talk about this, he's like, I don't like these younger people denigrating the people that came before them. And he's like, he made the point that none of the none of history's greatest entrepreneurs or investors did that. They had the opposite perspective. All of them had idols. You just made the point. You can't understand Jeff Bezos until you tell you Sam Walton. You can't understand Sam Walton until you understand JC Penny and Sol Price. Contemporary”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad you brought that up because I think this is why people get a lot of value, and I don't want it to make us bother, hey, this is an acquired founder show. The reason that some of the people in our audiences are the most successful people in the world, they're all reading biographies. They're all studying the history of business. I told you guys a few weeks ago, I was very lucky to have a two-hour one-on-one lunch with Sam Zell that I didn't think was possible. What I realized in that conversation, it's like, you don't make, you know, Sam's Ellis company for almost $40 billion, right? $38 billion, whatever it was. It's like, you don't build a company, sell for $40 billion, and then learn all this. It's like he was doing this since he was young. We were talking in his autobiography. He talks about...”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally like, I mean, aside, we have no agenda here that is like. Both an advantage that we have, all three of us, and kind of a secret that we have, which is that we did Walmart because we wanted to do Amazon. And so we were like, how do we do Amazon? Right? We got to do Walmart first. Right way to study”
2023-03-29 · Founders · A conversation with David and Ben from the Acquired podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source